Hello and welcome to Blends Bash 2022, hosted by the lovely folks at The Book Club Cook Book. Every year they send out some of their delicious spice blends to bloggers like myself who experiment and then share the results with you! This year I was assigned 3 different spice blends to play with. ThisContinue reading BLENDS BASH 2022: Shrimp with Red New Orleans Sauce (1960)
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The Peppermint Martini (an interim idea). Somebody once said, “if the perfect martini is ever created, it won’t be a martini.” Until now, two things stood between the martini and perfection: Gin and Vermouth. Substitute Smirnoff for gin and you’re halfway home. But what can you substitute for vermouth? We haven’t found it yet, butContinue reading Smirnoff Peppermint Martini (1972)
I feel like my political and cultural inclinations are slowly but determinedly turning into proto-retirement hobbies. And I can’t even imagine that I’ll ever have enough money to retire! It’s another one of those Pak Protector transformations, where our versions of what it is to be older are a mixture of strange new instincts, and […]
I know the world is going to hell in a futuristic handbasket — I know this because All Media Tells Me So, and who am I to question all the signals. But I can’t help but note that I’m really happy at the moment. I guess I’m always fairly countercyclical in my weltanschaung vs the […]
Ever since I worked at the Guardian’s New Media Lab in the Nineties and it was my actual job, I’ve been thinking about how news media is produced. A lot of my thinking was originally driven by just extrapolating out where things were headed. The increasingly high frequency of the news-cycle, for instance, was so […]
I’m halfway through a memo for work. I’m struggling a bit with the style, because it’s stuck between being broadly informative and terse, and rah-rah-inspiring, and I’m not sure which way to go with it. It’s also the first bit of writing I’ve done for a while (and certainly the first since my heavy flirtation […]
You can hear in the background of this blog, like a creek at the end of a field, a constant wash of attitudes changing. Not much, to be honest, or not as much as I’d hope. At the end of college, a friend of mine was terrified of backing into just one role, ending up […]
I guess it’s appropriate that we can’t agree on what the brain worms metaphor’s original vehicle actually is. In his description of the Internet culture term, Max Read claims, reasonably, that the originals are maybe like tapeworms or toxoplasma. But I always think about the Ceti Eel in Wrath of Khan (but then, I’m always thinking of Wrath of Khan, especially, these […]
A good friend made a Facebook post saying “Sadly it turns out that the latest AI photo app y’awl using to look hot and sexy is built off the back of a training set full of work stolen from artists without payment. How disappointing. We sorted this shit years ago with Creative Commons licensing. It’s […]
On April 17, 2019, I gave a talk at the Digital Public Library of America conference (DPLAfest). This is the transcript of that talk. I love the librarian community. You all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee, recognizing the potential to help […]